ence, went to a play of Shakespeare's
for the passage. For the bard of Avon is _par excellence_ the poet of
England. Keen as, in later years, has been the love of country displayed
by such men as Thomson, Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, and Mr. Swinburne, it
is in the pages of Shakespeare that we find the most magnificent
outbursts of national feeling. Let it be granted that the poet has not
hesitated to throw a few satiric pebbles at his countrymen. Everybody
will recall the amusing colloquy in 'Hamlet,' in which the Gravedigger
humorously reflects upon the sanity of the English people, declaring
that, if Hamlet be mad, it will not be noted in England, for there the
men are as mad as he is. And then there is that other diverting colloquy
in 'Othello,' wherein Iago stigmatizes Englishmen as 'most potent in
potting,' asserting that they 'drink with facility your Dane dead
drunk,' so expert is your Englishman in his drinking.

But these be the gibes of Danes and Italians--not of the man Shakespeare
or of Englishmen speaking with his voice. True it is that if Shakespeare
was strongly patriotic, he was so only in common with the Englishmen of
his day. He lived in an age when the English people were consumed with a
spirit of burning affection for the isle which they inhabited--when the
great religious upheaval which we call the Reformation had set the blood
coursing through their veins, and infused new life into their heart and
brain--and when the fear of Spanish domination had joined all classes in
an indissoluble bond of love and loyalty. Probably the English nation
never was more thoroughly united, more profoundedly in earnest, more
closely attached to its traditions and its soil, than in those spacious
times of great Elizabeth. And if Shakespeare produced play after play
dealing with the history of his country, and presenting on the boards
many of the most famous Englishmen of the past, he was led to do so, no
doubt, not only because the topic had attractions for him, but because
the Englishmen of his day revelled in such reminders of the stirring
years gone by--of the great soldiers, statesmen, clerics, and the like,
who had shed lustre on the national name. There must have been a decided
and continuous demand for these elaborate chronicle-dramas, and it may
be argued that the poet, in supplying them, did but comply with the call
made upon him by his public patrons.

The fact, however, that Shakespeare found historical plays